“Do you feel like arguing with a can of deodorant that registers nine on the Richter scale?” —Ace
Story
The Doctor pilots the TARDIS to Iceworld, the name of a spaceport/trading center on the permanent dark side of the planet Svartos, where legend has it that a dragon lurks in the deep caverns below the outpost— he’s hoping to see it himself.
Iceworld is run by the villainous Kane, a humanoid alien native to a very cold world, who can only survive in the refrigerated chambers of the Iceworld outpost and even there must occasionally rest in a cryogenic chamber to lower his body temperature (to 193 below zero). Kane is part gangster and part warlord. He’s been gathering a mercenary army who he puts in cryogenic suspension, which erases their memories so that they become obedient zombies.
At the spaceport, the Doctor and Mel encounter their old acquaintance Sabalom Glitz, who’s in trouble with Kane over a gambling debt but hopes to make good by finding a legendary treasure supposedly guarded by the dragon. They also encounter Ace, a 16-year-old girl from Earth transported to Iceworld by an unexplained “time storm” (see more on Ace, below) and now working as a waitress
The Doctor wants to discover an unknown species and Glitz wants treasure. Unknown to our heroes Kane is using them to find the dragon and its treasure for a sinister purpose of his own.
Review
Well, that’s much better than last week’s story. The new Seventh Doctor era of Dr Who hasn’t found its feet quite yet, and there are some large and gaping plot holes in this story, but on the whole it’s far more enjoyable viewing than we’ve had previously this season— and with the arrival of Ace as the new companion, the pieces of the Seventh Doctor puzzle finally fall into place.
Overall I’d call it a middle-of-the-road episode of Classic Dr Who, and it’s always hard to figure out what to say about those (loudly shouting my complaints or my praise is much easier). Let’s just acknowledge the plot holes first:
Kane starts the story with a female henchman, leader of Iceworld’s guards, who is trying to find a way to escape from his service. She’s got an interesting story of her own going on, with hints of a definite backstory with Kane (I won’t spoil the details) and with a male sidekick of her own she plots to steal Glitz’s ship and escape. Halfway through the story, Kane discovers her treachery and kills both her and her assistant— and then they are replaced with a near identical female and male pair of guards who play exactly the same role in the rest of the story, except that they have no story. It’s a dramatic enough moment when the first pair are killed but just feels weird when a pair of nonentities step right into their place. I imagine the writer (Ian Briggs) was going for some statement about how Kane sees his people as interchangeable drones, but it doesn’t really come across. Since a pair of guards was needed in the rest of the story, it would have been better to keep the interesting characters around for the role, saving their fate for the climax.
Later, Kane sends the two new guards to go kill the dragon and bring the treasure back to him. They do so quite easily— why didn’t he just do that before? Although he’s been eavesdropping on the Doctor and companions, it’s eventually clear that nothing he hears is anything he didn’t already know. What exactly was he waiting for?
There’s a subplot with a little child, the daughter of one of the travelers passing through the spaceport. After Kane has all the Iceworld visitors killed near the end of the story, she escapes by hiding under a table and is left wandering around. As we see her wander through every set— including the “restricted section” of Kane’s headquarters— and finally meet the dragon, which picks her up and carries her along, it starts to seem like there’s something mysterious about this child, some connection with the dragon or with the main plot which will be revealed at the end— but it isn’t. At the very end, her mother turns up (having equally mysteriously survived Kane’s massacre) and they head on their way. It’s this strange, eery subplot that just comes to nothing.
At the end of the story, Mel decides to leave— for no particular reason. After the adventure’s over, Glitz is going to take Ace back to her home on present-day Earth (this raises questions about Glitz, who we first met two million years in the future and whose ability to reach present-day Earth is therefore questionable) and Mel just randomly decides to go with him, leading the Doctor to then extend an invitation to Ace to come with him in the TARDIS. The Doctor and Mel have a semi-tearful farewell but again, their conversation never touches on exactly why she’s decided to leave. It’s the absolute contrast to Peri’s shocking departure last season: the most undramatic companion departure ever.
And speaking of no particular reason, Dragonfire includes the most infamous cliffhanger in Classic Dr Who’s history: the literal cliffhanger as episode 1 ends with the Doctor climbing over a railing and hanging by his umbrella over a bottomless precipice— for no reason whatsoever except that it’s the end of the episode and some peril was needed. This one can’t be blamed on the writer: the script called for the Doctor to be already climbing down a cliff face as part of his cave exploring, then to reach a point where he could find no foothold, and slowly begin to slip. It was only while shooting that the set design and some hasty work by the director (who was horribly embarrassed when he realized too late how it looked) produced the problematic scene.
So: those are the problems in the story, listed and dealt with. On the good side, Kane is a great villain in the classic Classic mold (if you’ll excuse the phrase). The script manages to handle Dr Who’s trademark style of humor much better than the last two— I especially like a scene where the Doctor attempts to distract what he assumes is a typical brainless guard by asking him gobbledegook philosophy questions, only to find himself trapped in a lengthy conversation with the guard who is delighted to have someone to discuss philosophy with for a change. Later, when another guard catches the Doctor in an unauthorized area and asks “What are you doing here?” he replies with “Why is everyone around here so preoccupied with metaphysics?” “She’s going to kill us,” Glitz explains. “Ah, an existentialist,” the Doctor says.
The whole philosophy bit was a timely parody: shortly before Dragonfire taped, two British philosophy professors had published a length book called Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text which analyzed the philosophy of the series in the most dense, jargony academese you can imagine (even us superfans couldn’t wade through it). The nonsense which the Doctor and the first guard spout to each other consists of direct quotations from the book.
The sets look pretty good if you grade on a curve for the limitations of the time and the budget. The story was shot in a larger soundstage than Dr Who’s usual, giving them room for some vertical space that makes Iceworld’s locations seem unusually large. The ice doesn’t look much like ice— but then that turns out to be a plot point, as it turns out the underground ice caves are actually artificial and the ice isn’t ice in the first place.
Most important, though: the story is just more fun to watch than anything Dr Who had managed to put out in this season. It’s not great, but it’s not bad.
The good times for the Seventh Doctor, though, are still ahead.
Ace
Ace, played by Sophie Aldred, is the companion the Seventh Doctor was meant to travel with. A lot of fans, including me, think the Seventh Doctor and Ace are the best Doctor/companion pair since the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith. That’s a statement about the relationship of the characters, not (sadly) a comparison of the overall quality of the two eras, but the Doctor and Ace will make even the worst of Classic’s final seasons palatable, and will elevate the best of them into the top rank of Classic Dr Who stories.
Ace is a 16-year-old orphan, expelled from school after accidentally blowing up the chemistry lab. Undaunted, she continued her explosives hobby at whatever home she had: she was engaged in trying to extract nitroglycerin from TNT when the time storm whisked her away to Iceworld. On Earth, working as a waitress, she’d dreamed that she might escape her dreary life by getting transported into outer space to live a life of adventure. Then she did get transported into outer space— and ended up working as a waitress again, only this time without any remaining dream to give her hope of something more interesting. The Doctor is exactly what she needs.
Ace’s real name is Dorothy, which we learn in this episode, but as far as I recall her surname was never given on air (I’m not checking ahead in this from-the-beginning series so there may be an upcoming exception I’ve forgotten). The character description, though, gave her full name as Dorothy Gale, a tribute to the character from The Wizard of Oz, which inspired the idea of the “time storm” that whisked her away from Earth. We’ll hear more of that unexplained time storm before the Classic series comes to an end.
And Ace is exactly what the Seventh Doctor needs in return. Mel was too bubbly and sunny a personality to allow him to develop in the way his new persona is about to: the point is so clear (in hindsight) that the Dr Who novels published after the Classic series ended eventually declared that the Doctor had telepathically influenced Mel’s sudden decision to leave, knowing he had to get her out of the way in order to begin the kind of life he’d decided to pursue.
Ace is the anti-Mel. She’s aggressive, often sullen, and quite possibly depressed. She fills aerosol cans with her favorite homemade explosive, “Nitro-9,” to use as grenades. (It’s impossible to imagine in today’s post-9/11 world a Dr Who companion whose hobby is making explosives and who carries a backpack full of what we now call IED’s— but no one was bothered at the time.) She doesn’t argue with the Doctor as Peri did: in fact she is clearly, from a very early point, desperately devoted to him (under the surface, there’s a lot of the little lost child in Ace, searching desperately for someone to be a parent to her). The combination makes her not only a more complex character than probably any companion we’ve seen, but also the perfect assistant— or perhaps I should even say henchman— to the Machiavellian “Dark Doctor” we’re about to meet.
She and the Seventh Doctor are going to be a— well, an explosive combination.
Ace and the Blue Peter Controversy
The following story strikes me as implausible in some respects and I really don’t know if the information is correct— what do I know about UK exotica, I’m an American— but I pass it along as I’ve heard it, just because it is in the Doctor Who Lore Vault:
Blue Peter is a long-running children’s magazine show on the BBC, featuring talk-show-style guests, educational segments, arts and crafts, and contests for young viewers to enter. It’s actually older than Dr Who, and has frequently featured stories about Dr Who. Children who appear on Blue Peter, through winning one of the show’s contests or by earning some other distinction, get a pin they can wear, called a “Blue Peter Badge.” These badges are evidently taken quite seriously over in the UK (as far as I understand from having heard the background to this particular bit of Dr Who lore). A lot of museums and theaters in the UK give free admission to any child who has a Blue Peter badge, as a reward for whatever they did to get on the show, and it’s taken seriously enough that when Blue Peter badges started showing up on eBay it was actually discussed in Parliament.
This caused a bit of controversy for Dr Who when Ace was introduced. Ace wears a jacket covered in patches and badges and viewers noticed that among them were not one, but two Blue Peter badges: the regular badge, and the extra-rare silver badge given to a child who makes it onto the show twice. The BBC actually received letters from people concerned that an evident delinquent like Ace could never have actually earned those badges and so shouldn’t be allowed to display them.Where Ace the character got the badges was never explained— but the controversy subsided when the producers revealed that the badges actually belonged to actress Sophie Aldred who had, indeed, earned them by appearing on Blue Peter twice. It seems knowing that was good enough for the people who’d complained.
Next Week:
“Remembrance of the Daleks,” 4 episodes, the season 25 premiere.
